When was the last time you heard about someone losing money on a Singapore condo?
Probably not recently. Show up to any gathering in 2026 and the property stories all rhyme: bought in 2019, sold last year, pocketed a comfortable six figures. Hear it enough times and you start to believe the market only has one gear — up.
It doesn’t.
For every dinner-table winner, there’s someone who quietly sold at a loss and — funny thing — never seems to bring it up at the reunion dinner.
And here’s the part that should make you sit up: a surprising number of them did everything the “safe” playbook said to do. Buy freehold. Buy Orchard. Buy Bukit Timah. Buy near the MRT. Prime district, prestige address, the whole bingo card.
And they still lost money.
This isn’t a scare piece. Property is still one of the better ways to build wealth in Singapore, and I’d be out of a job if it weren’t. But the old rules of thumb — repeated so often they’ve hardened into gospel — deserve a harder look.
So let’s retire a few of them, replace them with the questions that actually protect your money, and then follow that logic somewhere you might not expect: a quiet stretch of Dunearn Road at Dunearn House.
The Verdict In 60 Seconds
If you take nothing else from this article, take this:
- The myth: freehold + prime + near an MRT = guaranteed profit. In reality, several of Singapore’s most prestigious addresses sit among its worst money-losers.
- What actually protects you isn’t the postcode or the tenure. It’s three unglamorous things: not overpaying relative to the project’s own transaction history, buying where real resident demand exists (not just speculative foreign money), and matching the property to how long you actually plan to hold it.
- Through that lens, a new launch like Dunearn House in Bukit Timah starts to look interesting, competitively priced against its freehold neighbours, with a more efficient post-harmonisation layout. But it’s a 99-year leasehold in a new Turf City precinct that’s still being built. That makes it a longer game, not a quick flip.
- Best for: families who want a top-school address and plan to stay put, and long-horizon buyers who believe in the Turf City story.
- Think twice if: you want a 99-year lease to pass down, or you’re banking on a fast pop right after it’s built.
First, Let’s Retire Four Pieces Of “Safe” Advice
“Buy freehold.” “Buy Orchard.” “Buy Bukit Timah.” “Buy near the MRT.” Every one of these is a decent rule of thumb. But none of them is a law of physics.
Rules of thumb break. And they tend to break on exactly the properties that looked most bulletproof, the ones people bought precisely because they felt like the “safe” choice.
And the evidence is out there for anyone to pull: not my opinion, just transaction data and ten minutes with a coffee.
Prime, A Stone’s Throw From Orchard — And 27 Losses Out Of 27
Start with OUE Twin Peaks on Leonie Hill Road: 462 units, walking distance to Orchard MRT and the Orchard shopping belt, about as central as central gets.
Our research found something brutal: over a single one-year window, the project recorded 27 loss-making resales and not one profit. Twenty-seven out of twenty-seven.
Pull the records again today and the wall of red has only grown:
Twenty-seven out of twenty-seven, in the heart of District 9. If this were a restaurant, that’s a one-star review from 100% of diners, for a place a five-minute stroll from Orchard Road.
So why?
Partly because it’s a 99-year leasehold ringed by freehold competitors. But the bigger issue was its ownership profile. A sizeable share of buyers were foreign investors with little reason to hold on if returns disappointed. As newer luxury projects like Rivière, Irwell Hill Residences, and Avenir drew tenants away, some chose to cut their losses and park their capital elsewhere instead.
The pre-harmonisation layouts didn’t help either. A nominal 549- or 570-square-foot unit devoted more space to balconies than today’s harmonised layouts, leaving less usable living space and making resale comparisons less favourable.
Prestige address, ugly outcome.
“But That’s Leasehold. Freehold Is Different.” Is It?
Take Peak @ Cairnhill 1, on the prestigious Cairnhill Circle — freehold, one of the most exclusive addresses in the country, and a short walk from Paragon and Somerset. On paper it ticks every “safe” box. It hasn’t been spared either:
Some of these sellers held for the better part of a decade and still came out several hundred thousand dollars poorer, at annualised losses of 4–5% a year. Part of the drag is the address taken literally: Cairnhill really is up a little hill, and units set back up the slope have struggled to command the rents owners banked on.
Part of it is the layout — a non-harmonised floor plan padded out with balconies and bay windows, so you paid full PSF for space you can’t fully live in. Freehold tenure is a genuine long-term advantage. It is not a force field. It didn’t save these owners, because the things that sank them had nothing to do with tenure. Freehold is forever; unfortunately, so is a price you overpaid.
It Isn’t Only Orchard — The CBD And The Waterfront Bled Too
Marina One Residences sits in the heart of the CBD, within walking distance of three MRT lines. It was still among the handful of projects with more than 44 loss-making resales in the past 1 year.
Part of its problem is gloriously unglamorous: for all the Marina Bay dazzle, there isn’t a single primary school within a kilometre. Fantastic for a skyline photo; less fantastic when families — the deepest buyer pool there is — quietly cross you off the list.
Then there’s Reflections at Keppel Bay, a Daniel Libeskind design on the waterfront, the kind of building that ends up on postcards:
One three-bedder bought in 2012 for $3.7 million sold for $2.78 million, almost a $1 million haircut after costs. The project’s average price fell by roughly 15% between 2013 and 2025. These aren’t dodgy addresses in the middle of nowhere. They’re trophy addresses. Which is precisely the point.
So What Actually Went Wrong?
Three culprits, none of which appears anywhere in a glossy brochure.
- The buyer pool didn’t just shrink — it changed hands. Prime CBD and waterfront condos leaned heavily on foreign money, with foreigners making up a quarter to nearly a third of original purchasers on some projects. Then, in April 2023, the government raised Additional Buyer’s Stamp Duty on foreigners to 60%, a levy that now adds S$3 million to a S$5 million purchase. Foreign demand at the top end collapsed: by late 2025, Singaporeans accounted for 76% of all homes sold at S$5 million or more in the Core Central Region. Owners who bought when that money was in the room are now trying to sell into a room where it simply isn’t.
- Forced hands set the benchmark. As with OUE Twin Peaks, when a few owners have to sell in a hurry, their discounted prices become the reference point that drags everyone else down.
- The quiet killer — overpaying against the project’s own average. Loss after loss clusters among buyers who paid well above what their development typically transacts at. You don’t need the market to crash to lose money. You just need to have overpaid on the way in.
The lesson: prestige alone won’t hold a price up. Entry price and real, resident-driven demand are. Hold that thought. It’s about to do some heavy lifting.
Meanwhile, The Small-Unit Party Is Over
There’s a second shift worth understanding, because it changes who your future buyer even is.
Not long ago, the one-bedder was the default “investment” unit — small quantum, easy to rent, buy two and tell the relatives you’re a property investor. That logic has worn thin.
New shoebox sales have collapsed to a fraction of their old volumes — down roughly 90% from their 2012 peak — and small units are now widely seen as harder to resell and weaker on capital growth than family-sized ones.
Why? A big part of it is that Singaporeans simply have more to spend. Household incomes have climbed, and a whole cohort of owners who rode the upcycle from 2018 onwards have since sold, banked the gain, and traded up.
The natural buyer today isn’t hunting for a 1-bedder to flip. They can stretch to a two- or three-bedder for their own family, and new two-bedders are already pushing past the $1.8 million mark.
For you, the takeaway is about liquidity and exit. Demand — the real, resident kind that holds prices up — has drifted toward homes families want to live in: bigger layouts, in real neighbourhoods, near schools.
None of that is a knock on smaller units. It’s a signal about where the biggest pool of future buyers now sits. Keep that in mind as we cross town.
Which Brings Me To A Quiet Stretch Of Dunearn Road
Three neighbours, all a short walk apart, all telling different stories.
Royalgreen — freehold, by Allgreen, launched in 2019.
Fourth Avenue Residences — 99-year leasehold, also Allgreen, right by Sixth Avenue MRT, launched in 2018–19. And the newcomer,
Dunearn House — the first private residential launch inside the Bukit Timah Turf City transformation, a 99-year leasehold by Frasers Property, CSC Land and Sekisui House.
Same neighbourhood, three very different propositions. This is where the abstract “new launch versus resale” debate stops being abstract — because here you can literally stand in one and look at the other two.
Even Dunearn House’s Neighbours Who Profited Barely Did
This is the part the man on the street never checks. And it’s exactly what happened next door to Dunearn House — at Fourth Avenue Residences and Royalgreen. Losing money is one failure mode. The quieter one, the one those two neighbours show, is making money so slowly it barely counts.
Look at the profitable resales next door at Fourth Avenue Residences, the ones that did sell for a gain:
Take a 710 sq ft two-bedder bought in April 2019 near the peak of the day at about $2,552 psf, sold in April 2026 at $2,674 psf, a gain of roughly $87,000 over seven years. Sounds fine, until you annualise it: about 0.7% a year.
That’s a “win” so slim it barely out-ran a fixed deposit — seven years of ownership to roughly match what the bank would have paid you for doing nothing.
The larger three-bedders (around 1,109 sq ft) did better, but still mostly landed in the 2–4% a year range, and that’s before you count stamp duties, interest and agent fees.
The freehold two-bedders at Royalgreen next door tell a similar story, with several exits annualising well under 2%.
This is exactly the comparison I ran in my Hudson Place review — where the project was pricing in a projected gross yield of around 3.5%. The useful question was never “is this a good project?” It was “does the projected return actually beat what comparable homes nearby have really delivered?”
Do that honestly and a lot of prime, prestigious, near-MRT stock turns out to have been treading water for years.
The 667 Sq Ft That Isn’t Really 667 Sq Ft
So if the neighbours’ returns have been thin, does buying here make sense at all? It can, but only if you buy smarter than they did. And that starts with something most buyers never account for.
Before June 2023, developers could count the air-con ledge — typically 4–5% of a unit — as saleable area. You paid full PSF for it, even though the only thing that ever stood on that ledge was your air-con compressor.
A “667 sq ft” unit from that era, like a resale at Royalgreen, folds that non-livable space into the headline number.
Then came GFA harmonisation. For projects submitted from June 2023 — Dunearn House among the early ones — the air-con ledge becomes common property and is no longer sold to you. The square footage on the brochure now reflects space you can actually use. The clearest way to see it is to put the two side by side:
So when a harmonised Dunearn House unit and an older Royalgreen unit both read “667 sq ft” at a similar PSF, they are not the same thing. Put a number on it: an air-con ledge runs roughly 4–5% of a unit, so on 667 sq ft that’s about 30 sq ft.
At around $2,800 psf, that’s close to $84,000 of floor area you’re either paying for and can’t use (the older unit) or getting as usable living space (the harmonised one). Same headline size, same rough PSF — one just hands you more actual home, plus newer facilities, smart-home wiring and a fresh lease on top.
That’s not marketing. It’s arithmetic.
But New Isn’t Free — You’re Swapping Freehold For A Fresh 99 Years
Now the honest counterweight, because I’m not here to sell you a fairy tale.
Royalgreen is freehold. Dunearn House is a 99-year leasehold. Over a 20- to 30-year hold, lease decay slowly eats into the leasehold’s advantage, and freehold’s “forever” starts to matter. On a sub-10-year horizon, you’re barely exposed to that. So whether the tenure trade is worth it comes down to one thing: how long you intend to stay.
There’s a second cost to buying new here: time. Dunearn House sits inside a precinct that won’t finish for years, and it isn’t expected to be completed until around 2030. You’re buying tomorrow’s neighbourhood at today’s price, which can be shrewd, but means the payback is a longer wait, not an overnight win. In the meantime, what you own is a very handsome artist’s impression.
Royalgreen | Fourth Avenue Residences | Dunearn House | |
|---|---|---|---|
Tenure | Freehold | 99-year leasehold | 99-year leasehold |
Developer | Allgreen | Allgreen | Frasers / CSC Land / Sekisui House |
Status | Launched 2019, completed | Launched 2018–19, completed | New launch in Q3 2026, Estimated TOP 2030 |
GFA-harmonised? | No (pre-2023) | No (pre-2023) | Yes |
Indicative PSF* | ~$2,757–2,877 (resale) | ~$2,622 avg (2026 resale) | ~$2,800+ (indicative launch) |
Sixth Ave MRT | Walkable | Walkable | Walkable |
Suits | Freehold legacy buyers | Move-in-now buyers | Long-horizon / Turf City first-movers |
So Who Is Dunearn House Actually For?
This is the part I refuse to answer with a blanket “it’s a great buy.” It can be a smart buy or a mediocre one, and it depends far more on you than on the project.
The family chasing a top-school address. Methodist Girls’ School sits within a kilometre, and the whole Bukit Timah stretch is prime school-catchment territory. For this buyer the math isn’t only about capital gain. If the alternative is renting in the area through your children’s school years, ownership offsets years of rent you’d otherwise never see again. That’s a real “return” — it just doesn’t show up on a PSF chart.
The long-horizon own-stayer who believes in Turf City. You’re a first-mover into a masterplanned precinct, in a spot that’s walkable to Sixth Avenue MRT — rare, given most of the freehold homes around here are not. If you buy the transformation story and plan to live it, the wait is the price of admission, and you pay it on purpose.
But if you’re a quick-flip investor, or the buyer who wants freehold to pass down, this is probably not your project. And that’s fine. Better to know now than after you’ve signed.
Dunearn House can be very good, or merely okay. Which one it is depends on which of those buyers you are. I’d rather you worked that out for yourself than let a well-staged showflat and a complimentary latte decide it for you.
The One Question I’d Ask Before Signing Anything
Every launch sounds convincing on launch day. That’s the developer’s job. The real test comes after the excitement fades. So run the unglamorous scenario:
If the market did nothing for the next five years — prices drift sideways, no spectacular gains — would you still be comfortable owning this?
For a leasehold in a precinct that’s still taking shape, that question is the whole ballgame. If your answer leans on the fundamentals — the schools, the MRT, the Turf City build-out, buying in below your freehold neighbours on usable space, then everything else is upside.
If your answer depends entirely on a quick jump in price, the loss-makers earlier in this article should give you pause. They all sounded like sure things once, too.
Not Sure Which Side Of That Line You’re On?
Probably a good moment to say what I actually do.
Hi, I’m Elson. Advisory and research is my full-time work, and I sit on the buyer’s side of the table — digging through transaction histories and pressure-testing shortlists against the alternatives. Mostly, I tell people when the “safe” buy is the risky one. It’s the same analysis this whole article is built on.
If you’re weighing Dunearn House — or wondering whether a nearby resale, freehold or otherwise, is the smarter home for your money, I’m happy to walk through the numbers with you.
We’ll compare the options against your budget and your holding horizon, and figure out which one fits. You might conclude Dunearn House is the one. You might not. Either way, you’ll know exactly why.
Elson Koo is a property advisor who’d rather talk you out of a bad buy than into a good-sounding one.
*Disclaimer, all prices are accurate at time of writing. Prices may change without prior notice.
